


When Sighed the Straightened Bud into the Flower

by wired



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: F/F, Minor Character Death, Poetry, Regrets, Teacher-Student Relationship, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-19
Updated: 2007-07-19
Packaged: 2017-10-11 15:43:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/114001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wired/pseuds/wired
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bitter regret is saved for things we didn't do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Sighed the Straightened Bud into the Flower

**Author's Note:**

> Poetry from Robert Burns and Edna St. Vincent Millay

Lily brought poetry. The summer after her 5th form she went home on holiday and came back with half her trunk filled with Muggle poetry books. Lily was at that unpleasant/amusing stage of growing up when everything was desperately intense. Minerva was too old a hand at teaching to worry about it anymore. But when she came back, she brought poetry. Minerva was dubious, of course. Wizard poetry was beautiful and moving, and the Muggle version, with flat, unscented words, seemed pallid. Even wizard translations were odd, with a cloying smell of hay overlaying all of "Little Boy Blue", or the unspeakable eye-watering intensity of the gunpowder all through "Casabianca".

Lily lingered after the first day's transfiguration class, sitting on her desktop and kicking one foot so her long white leg flashed distractingly. Minerva knew from experience that it was merely a short (very short) skirt under the robe, and not actual nudity, but it was still prone to make one's mind wander. After the rest of the class filed out, and all the add/drop slips were signed, Lily.... was that a _sashay_?... came up to Minerva's desk.

"Professor McGonagall? I have a present for you?"

Diverting the habitual mental rant about the habit of always addressing professors in the interrogative, Minerva held out her hand.

"It's a Scottish poet? I thought you might, you know, because you're fond of plaid, and um?"

"Thank you, Lily. I do not normally accept gifts from students, but we can always add it to the library when I am done reading it."

"Of course, Professor. I marked a few poems for you?"

That evening, Minerva curled up in her favorite tartan dressing gown in front of a crackling fire, and read the marked poems. "My Love is Like a Red Red Rose" left her unmoved, but she stifled some most unprofessorial guffaws at  
O Jeany, dinna toss your head,  
An set your beauties a' abread!  
Ye little ken what cursed speed  
The blastie's makin!

The next time Minerva saw Lily in passing, she thanked her for the poems. Lily grinned, then blushed.

Muggles were amazing, the way they could make you feel like you were sensing things, just by using words, and none of the additions wizarding text had. Some poems had scents, or tastes, like that amazing one about the plums. Minerva ordered anthologies, and picked her favorite poets and ordered more by them.  
..........................  
_When sighed the straightened bud into the flower_  
She looked at Lily across the table, watched her lips forming the words to another poem, one about growth and hope, and tried very hard to keep her mind on the poetry. And buds. And flowers. And lush rose petals. And the smell of the sun heating black dirt. And the deceptively fragile appearance of Lily's fine features, concealing a witch of sharply dangerous powers.

She looked at Lily across the table, and thought of all the reasons she should develop an aversion to poetry. A student. A girl who was already showing an inclination to a boy in her class, not a witch older than her mother. A student in her house. A bright vessel of potential.

She looked at Lily across the table, and visualized the future. A husband, a baby or two, a professional job; or Minerva sacked, disgraced, and branded in a way that prevented her from ever working with the bright and hopeful wizards of tomorrow.

She looked at Lily across the table, closed her eyes and remembered.  
_Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this;  
And that I knew, though not the day and hour.  
Too season-wise am I, being country-bred,  
To tilt at autumn or defy the frost:  
Snuffing the chill even as my fathers did,  
I say with them, "What's out tonight is lost."_

Minerva transfigured just the tips of her fingers to cat's claws, and dug them into her palms. The sharp piercing pain helped steady her, and she avoided the tendons of her hand by long practice. Curiosity killed the cat. Being a cat made her no less curious, but gave her tools to let her reason catch up to her desires.

The dry seed of failure, indeed. Minerva's worst doubts circled around this. She was a a dry seed, no children, nothing but the hundreds of students, stupid and bright and hopeless and wicked and wanting and despairing, who had passed through her class. Nothing but learning, and was learning going to be enough? Looking at another four or five decades of this, and possibly Headmistressship, and in the end, a fading into senility and dessication. Didn't she deserve one chance.... but no. Not even one.

Instead, Minerva watched James, with his awkward wit, with his permanent tousle, step into Lily's life more and more, until James-and-Lily was one word, inseparable. And truly, they seemed happy, or as happy as one could be, when your happiness had twice the surface area to be wounded. Minerva wished she could shrink her vulnerable skin to cat shape, instead of feeling like it was as big as a cape.

She danced at their wedding. Well, not actual dancing, because there are standards, but they used the summer-empty castle to have their wedding, and of course all the professors were invited. Minerva wished them well, and toasted the happy couple, and was very careful about how much butterbeer she had, lest she say something indiscreet.  
_I only hoped, with the mild hope of all  
Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree,  
A fairer summer and a later fall  
Than in these parts a man is apt to see,  
And sunny clusters ripened for the wine:_

And then just two short years later, when it seemed that the world was ending, and the only thing left was to fight the best rearguard action possible to protect the young, she died. Lily died, and even though she was not the first, Minerva was stunned into immobility. Of course James and Lily would draw the wrath of He Who Must Not Be Named. And of course Lily would defend her child. Wasn't she the most passionate child Minerva had ever taught? Lily the hero who died fighting for her child, and the sudden cessation of violence, almost like the stunned silence in your ears after aparation, it was all obvious, and yet bitterly bitterly unjust.

She should have kissed Lily.  
_I tell you this across the blackened vine._


End file.
